Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Yowza!

As I've probably mentioned before, I'm currently building a corpus of comics to be used in research related projects. I've had some donations from companies already, and Dark Horse just about doubled my collection in one fell swoop! They are thanked tremendously (as are everyone else who's donated). I'm still interested in expanding the collection, especially with international books, so if you can help out with that, shoot me an email.

The ultimate goal, which we're inching towards implementing, is to create a massvie database of books. We will code various properties of the books, then be able to mine the data to come up with lots of interesting statistics about the structure of comics — cross-listed by country, genre, company, etc. This can tell us about the trends and patterns in visual languages of the world. Plus, all the information will also store coding information about the panels, strips, and books that I will be using in experimentation.

Hopefully I'll be able to get this set up to start having data entered by the Fall (most likely by enterprising undergrads... anyone out there go to Tufts or nearby schools and want to do research for course credit??).